The first thing you should know about reading in college is that it bears little
or no resemblance to the sort of reading you do for pleasure, or for your own
edification.

Professors assign more than you can possibly
read in any normal fashion.

We know it, at least most of us do.You have to make strategic decisions about
what to read and how to read it. You're reading for particular reasons: to get
background on important issues, to illuminate some of the central issues in
a single session of one course, to raise questions for discussion. That calls
for a certain kind of smash-and-grab approach to reading.You can't afford to
dilly-dally and stop to smell the lilies. You might not think that's the ideal
way to learn, and I would sort of agree. But on the professiorial side of things,
we feel a real obligation to cover a particular field of knowledge in the course
of a semester, and we can't do it all through lectures. Nor would I personally
want to talk at my students day in and day out.

So okay, if you're not going to read everything with intense precision and
in gory detail, then how are yougoing to read it? What I hope to provide in
the following page is a few of the Stupid Academic Tricks [tm] about reading
that I've learned over the years. These aren't foolproof--they won't work for
everyone. They all take a while to master, through trial and error. This ain't
Cliff's Notes here.

SKIMMING FOR ARGUMENTS:

INTRODUCTIONS, CONCLUSIONS, SIGNPOSTS

The first rule, in some ways the only rule, is skim, skim, skim. But skimming is not just reading
in a hurry, or reading sloppily, or reading the last line and the first line.
It's actually a disciplined activity in its own right. A good skimmer has a
systematic technique for finding the most information in the least amount of
time.

I'm going to use Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (Verso Press)
in making my argument. It's a book which is taught at the college level with
increasing frequency and it offers some clear perspectives on why skimming for
courses is a good idea.

Let me take you through a skim of this book,
bit by bit.

In the first four pages, you should only really care about this sentence:

"The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a
more satisfactory explanation of the 'anomaly' of nationalism" .

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO IGNORE AND WHEN
TO IGNORE IT?

HOW DO YOU KNOW TO SPOT THIS SENTENCE?

1. Experience

When you've done it enough times, you'll know when someone's going off
on a tangent or exploring issues that you don't have time to deal with.

2. Context

It's often clear from the text itself when someone is making a side point
or exploring an extraneous issue.

3. Objectives

Why are you reading this: what is the subject of the course, the focus
of the discussion? Suppose you're reading Imagined Communities to
think about nationalism: Anderson's thoughts about the relationship of nationalism
to Marxist theory, while not totally irrelevant, aren't directly germane
either. If this were a class centrally concerned with Marxist theories of
history, or on Marxist revolutions and their relationship to nationalism,
it might be another matter.

4. Signposts

"I will argue" is a signpost--"If the Vietnamese invasion and occupation
of Cambodia" is not.

OKAY, I FOLLOWED THE RULES.

NOW LOOK WHAT I FOUND.

"My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer
to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as
well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. "

"To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they
have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed
over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy."

"I will be trying to argue that the creation of these aretfacts towards
the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a
complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created,
they become 'modular', capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees
ofself-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and
be merged with acorrespondingly wide variety of political and ideological
constellations." p. 4

Good job. But these are pretty tricky passages.
Table them for a while.

MORE SIGNPOSTS: CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS

At the bottom of page 5, top of page 6, you'll see:

"I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined
political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."

This is key. You'll want to understand all the component parts of this
definition.

So, look for more signposts:

At the top of page 6:

"It is imagined because the members of event the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."

top of page 7

"The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them,
encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic,
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous
with mankind."

middle of page 7

"It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an
age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy
of the divinely-ordered, hierarchical dynastic realm ...nations dream of
being free, and if under God, directly so."

Why are there ellipses (...) in the last passage?

Here's what I snipped out:

"Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most
devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with
the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each
faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch...

This takes too much time to unpack and it's not directly relevant to your
comprehension of sovereignity: if you don't understand what he means by the
term, you will have to seek comprehension in the text itself or from the dictionary;
if you do understand (more or less), then this passage is a diversion.

More on the dictionary shortly.

bottom of page 7

"Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of
the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation
is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is
this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for
so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for
such limited imaginings."

In contrast, this is worth unpacking carefully.

*FINALLY , e.g, the end of definitions

*deep, HORIZONTAL comradeship: unpack this word, it's significant

*SUCH LIMITED IMAGININGS: may tell you something interesting about
Anderson's attitude towards nationalism as he describes it

Okay, so now you've skimmed the introduction and found
some key passages.

Now what?

IN THE MIDDLE: SEQUENCE OF ARGUMENTS

You don't have all day to waste on the intro. You've got to get a sense of
the whole book, get to the middle of it. Here's some steps to help you skim
your way into the heart of things.

1. Note the sequence of chapters by looking at their titles: what does Anderson
seem to think he needs to prove his general argument?

2. Read the introduction of each of the chapters assigned, and perhaps
even the ones not assigned.

3. Return to each chapter as assigned, in the sequence they appear in the
book. Do exactly what I outlined for the intro: read the introduction to the
chapter and look for the key argument(s) it contains. RELATE SPECIFIC ARGUMENTS
BACK TO GENERAL CASE IN THE BEGINNING AND CONCLUSION OF THE BOOK.

4. Sketch out an outline of the sequence of argument in each chapter: what
evidence does he muster to prove each specific point and in what order does
he muster it?

EXAMPLE: CHAPTER TWO, "Cultural Roots"

pp. 9 to top of 11: well-written material about religion, sentiment, and
so on, BUT it's NOT where you'll find the central ARGUMENT of this
chapter.

You start to see this instead on the middle of page 11:

"...in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn
of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The
century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it
its own modern darkness." 11

A bit later, on page 12:

"For present purposes, the two relevant cultural systems are the religious
community and the dynastic realm ."

So you read this chapter much as you would the introduction, but this time,
sketch out the sequence of argument:

I. Nationalism and national communities replace religion and religious
communities.

II. Nationalism and national communities also replace the dynastic realm,
the old monarchical order, around the same time.

III. This happens in Western Europe in the eighteenth century.

IV. discussion of religious community: summary of some of its features
(common sacred language, criteria for membership, 'non-arbitrariness of
the sign', hierarchical organization

V. reasons for decline of religious communities: exploration and expansion
of Europe, demotion of sacred language in favor of vernacular

VII. decline of dynastic realm: "for reasons that need not concern us here",
e.g., just skip the details

VIII. other fundamental changes besides decline of these two forms of social
organization were necessary to make national communities possible: the idea
of simultaneity and changes in consciousness or outlook

THINK ABOUT SEQUENCE AND WHAT DIFFERENCE
IT MAKES

This is the hardest thing of all to grasp about both reading AND writing.
Many students, when writing papers, understand that you need to clearly define
an overall argument and place it up front in the paper.

But after that point, many student papers often contains a more or less random
jumble of evidence which has some vague relation to the argument.

To develop an argument well, each point should lead logically and sequentially
to the next. There's a transition between chapter 2 and 3 in Imagined Communities
that provides an example of this. Anderson's discussion of print-capitalism
and the way it changed the outlook of 18th Century Europeans leads logically
into the next discussion, of secular national consciousness. His notion of
simultaneity is critical to his argument in Chapter 3.

Outlining the sequence of argument in readings should help you grasp this--assuming
the reading is well-written. This is, of course, a perilous assumption with
academic writing.

WHEN TO GO FOR THE DICTIONARY,

WHEN TO PUZZLE OVER WORDS OR REFERENCES

When a term comes up with great frequency, and seems to mean a lot to the
argument at hand, you must be sure you understand it. If you don't get what
Anderson means by simultaneity, for example, you're clearly missing something
important.

Take Anderson's use of the word allomorphism mentioned above, on page 7.
It's probably not worth thetime to figure this one out, since it's not directly
related to the key arguments of Chapter One. So skip over it, unless you're
curious.

(for the curious: it's a term from linguistics and geology for two or more
forms of the same thing morphemes in the case of language, crystals in the
case of geology)

FOOTNOTES

Footnotes are hugely overused in academia, but learning to read them is still
an important skill, (particularly in history!)

There are five different basic kinds of footnotes:

1) Logrolling

When scholars are complimenting or acknowledging each other's work. You
cite my work, I'll cite yours. Not too important unless you're trying to
reconstruct the intellectual biography of the scholar you're presently reading,
or trying to find work that might be comparable to the book you're looking
at. Sometimes amusing when you get "Anti-Logrolling", e.g., footnotes which
are there strictly to diss some other scholar.

2) Weird little stuff that distracts from the main point but which is
still kind of interesting.

This is the material that didn't fit, but that the scholar couldn't bear
to give up on. If you're skimming, you don't have the time to spare to look
at these kinds of footnotes. If you're doing research, it may be a different
matter.

3) Oh, by the way, there's one teeny tiny little exception.

This could be important, even if you're skimming. Sometimes scholars stick
big, hairy problems with their argument down in the footnotes somewhere.

4) Look, Ma, I did the reading.

Scholars, especially junior scholars, need to prove to their colleagues
that they know the scholarship in the field that they are working on. So
many footnotes are laundry lists of relevant books, or recap bodies of theory
on a particular subject. Relevant if you're researching, but not relevant
if you're skimming.

5) You want proof? I'll give you proof.

Even if you are skimming, you may want to know, when you're faced with
a substantive factual claim by an author, just how that person came by their
facts. You'll probably have to look in the footnotes to find out. If you
come across a factual assertion and you feel the need to know the source
of that fact, then read the footnote--even if you're skimming.

For example, if you read Anderson's footnotes, you'll find that he often
uses evidence pertaining specifically to the Dutch East Indies and French
South-East Asia (present-day Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and so on) to support
general arguments. This might be valid, but you might also wonder if he isn't
generalizing from too narrow a base.

When he isn't working from this body of primary evidence--which he obviously
knows best--then you might want to check in the bibliography to see what secondary
sources he's using about other countries. Note their date of publication.
Quite a few of these sources are older ones. Might there be a newer scholarship
that would complicate matters?

It also depends on the reading. Anderson's book is a broadly comparative,
generally argued book. Not that much of his book is going to need detailed
references to primary material: this is a synthesizing book, an overview of
many different literatures. It is different from a monograph, a tightly focused
study of some specific historical subject or era. In a monograph, footnote
references to evidence may be very, very important.

The Dictionary

Yes, sometimes you don't need to know what a word means, like "allomorphism"
above. But if a term recurs regularly in a text, or seems particularly central,
you MUST learn to pick up a dictionary and find out what the author
means. Learn to keep one by your side and don't try to bluff your way past
such a term. An initial mistake about the meaning of a term can rapidly multiply
into a gigantic misreading if you're not careful.

TAKING NOTES AND PREPARING FOR DISCUSSION

1. The Hi-Lighter Event Horizon.

Don't use a hi-lighter. They're useless. You'll end up marking every damn
thing under the sun.

2. Try writing down key arguments and making your own outline.

3. Mark things you don't understand, areas of uncertainty and so on: bring
them to class.

That's the whole point, you know: you should never be afraid to talk about
what you were uncertain about. Far from it.

4. Mark two or three areas of potential disagreement or debate: construct
a CRITIQUE of the reading to share during discussion.

CRITIQUE is not CRITICISM: Do not follow a scorched earth policy, but don't
feel limited by your own particular feelings and reactions: it's good to
think through a reasoned critique even when you don't necessarily agree
with it.